Water under the bridge

“Water under the bridge” is an English idiom, which means the past, which should remain in the past.

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Saying “Water under the bridge” we name, localize, and thus achieve illusory clarity in labeling a “segment” of a constantly renewing element. The water under the bridge is, in a sense, a stoic unit (situation): objective and uncompromising. It can be “taken” logically, but practically it is impossible. Just as before the irreversibility of time, history, and before fate, we must surrender.

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The name of the exhibition refers to two themes: water as a mythopoetic element, the chthonic part of St. Petersburg, and sensual, emotional living that unites man, city, nature through empathy. Interest in non-anthropocentric points of view, the search for other forms of communication — all these are attempts to build horizontal connections with the city and nature.

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The active presence of the water element in the city makes suspicion an innate feature of Petersburgers. Water is unstable, fluid, always changing. “What’s hiding there?” we think, and the mystifying mind creates demons and monsters through fear.

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At the exhibition there is a combination of symbolic and real concepts of water: on the one hand, a view of water as a deep-sea sacrament and a source of myths, and an objective rational view of a natural element, on the other.

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The exhibition is conditionally divided into two tiers: underwater and above-water spaces, respectively. The “Garden” by Alena Begova and Mark Maklakov begins the exhibition with a story about the alleged flood that occurred here. The water level line marks this section and links the two tiers of the exposure.

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Some of the presented works are site-specific and refer to the history of the MISP building. For example, the project of the group BIOROBOTY019 appeals to the fact that the building housed the police department, and the sound installation by Boris Shershenkov is a representation of the “model of the communicative hierarchy of a self-contained bureaucratic machine”. Evgeny Khlopotov’s Loop reflects the continuous cycle of history. This is ouroboros — a dragon catching its own tail.

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Some of the works are devoted to the ecological aspect of the water element. For example, the installation by Victoria Ikonen and Nobushige Kono deals with the role of water in natural ecosystems. The works of Yevgeny Molodtsov, Anna Tagantseva-Kobzeva and Andrey Rylov reveal beliefs and myths about water, referring to issues of life and death. The research perspective underlies the projects of Denis Lotarev and Vera Trofimova.

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“Water under the bridge” — a place / situation that will never happen again, will not be possible. The expression combines the ideas of the irreversibility of time, the inevitability of disaster and life in general. It necessarily highlights the property of human nature to think about how something could be, and the powerlessness of fantasy in the face of really that “water” that was under the bridge.

Curator: Anna Zavediy

Co-curator: Artur Konstantinov

Producer of the Interval project: Maria Kolotovkina

Assistant curator: Lilia Morozova

Coordinator: Maria Truntaeva

Print design: Sergey Karlovsky